Having met hundreds of people who struggle with this very real fear, it got me thinking: what if the risk of taking that plunge could be taken out of the equation? Is there, maybe, a way of starting a business that can allow people to dip their toe into the water, rather than jumping in at the deep end and risking everything? Perhaps if this were possible, I figured, more people would be willing and able to follow their hearts.
Maybe it’s your dream to start a business and for it to become your new full-time career. Maybe you just want to try something out for a bit of fun on the side. Or perhaps you already have a business but want to find a way of testing out some new product ideas without betting the farm.
Whatever reason you have for taking on this experiment, I very much hope that the experiences, tools and tricks I have included in this book help you to get closer to your goals. I’m pretty confident that if you put in the focus and energy required, they will.
There are lessons I have learned and tools I have found that can make the process of going from idea to first customer a whole lot quicker. Although the businesses I have started – and indeed the business you will start – are all very different, many of the steps we all go through are almost exactly the same.
Because starting a business is a road that’s been walked before, you’d be crazy to try to figure out every step of the route from scratch and on your own. Feel free to look at this book as a ‘cheat sheet’; the basic essentials you need to know about the key steps of developing an idea and getting it to market quickly.
By hotwiring the whole start-up process in this way, you’ll be able to do in days what most start-up entrepreneurs spend months on. Sure, you won’t build a billion-dollar company in a weekend, but you’ll be amazed at what you can achieve with a methodical process and, above all, two days of complete focus.
The progress you make in your first two days will most likely give you the confidence to take your idea even further. And, of course, the story of every successful company in the world began this way – someone overcame their fears and took the first step.
CHAPTER 1
‘Is it possible to come up with an idea for a business and be up and running, selling a product to paying customers, all in the space of two days?’
This was the question that first started my journey with the 48-hour start-up, a slightly crazy experiment that I took on in the spring of 2016, without any real idea of what the outcome would be. I wanted to give it a shot, to see if the above challenge were possible to achieve, with all of the modern tools available to us entrepreneurs and by applying the many lessons I’ve learned so far in my exciting, challenging and at times downright bizarre career in business.
Throughout my adventures as a young entrepreneur, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking at literally hundreds of entrepreneur events around the world. No matter how different the culture of the host country might be from my own, I have always felt at home in the company of other entrepreneurs. We are a sort of dysfunctional global family of people who just happen to think the same sort of way – people who don’t want to work for someone else, but who want to make a mark on the world in our own particular way.
We’re a group of people who like coming up with ideas, sometimes inventing products that hitherto didn’t exist in the world. In my experience at least, we’re also a group of people who tend to feel that life is short – that we ought to make the most of every second we have. For all kinds of reasons, we see starting a business as the best way of doing that – an opportunity to make a career for ourselves, maybe work with our friends, do something we love and perhaps in some small way change the world. What more could you want from your work?
But something I have found on my travels in this community is that not all of the people who feel this way actually do act on their emotions. In fact, most of the people who harbour such feelings live their lives in a fashion that contradicts them – they hold down a job, study at university, work towards a rise, pay their mortgages and generally go along with the status quo.
THE CULT OF WANTREPRENEURSHIP
Everywhere I’ve gone on my trips, speaking at different entrepreneurship events, I’ve been aware of the legions of ‘wantrepreneurs’ who frequent such conferences. People who think a lot about starting a business – they attend the seminars, buy all the books, even meet with successful entrepreneurs to ask for advice … but they never actually start.
Perhaps they don’t start out of fear of failure or maybe they just procrastinate, putting things off for another day. I am sure a lot of them are waiting for the ‘perfect idea’, which will never really come. They’re always telling their friends about the idea-of-the-week, never giving enough focus to one idea for it to become anything close to a reality.
Far too often, wantrepreneurs will inhibit this very healthy process by keeping their ideas all bottled up to themselves, never even so much as sharing them with anyone – let alone actually getting them onto the market. I think this is all such a tragedy – no doubt all kinds of ideas don’t make it into the world and, more importantly, so many people don’t get the chance of taking them there.
Maybe some of these justifications for inaction sound familiar … and I don’t want to be the one who says it but maybe, just maybe, the phrase ‘wantrepreneur’ applies to you. But don’t worry, it’s a very curable disease. I can assure you that if you’re willing to take action then it’s not a phrase that will describe you for much longer.
TELL EVERYONE YOUR IDEAS
There’s something that, for me, absolutely sums up the wantrepreneur mentality. Quite often, at the end of one of my talks, people will come up to me and introduce themselves. They’ll say, ‘Hey, I have an idea for a business,’ and I’ll say, ‘Oh, great, what’s your idea?’ … ‘Oh no, I can’t tell you that … what if you steal it?’ they’ll shriek.
Not only is this kinda funny, I think it is totally upside down. In my mind, if you have an idea for a business, especially if it’s a half-baked one, you should tell anyone who’ll listen – you never know which person might help you. They might give you some useful feedback or introduce you to someone who works in your industry or if you’re very lucky, point you in the direction of a willing customer.
Because people keep their cards close to their chests in this slightly misguided way, I never do get to hear all of these ideas. I should probably be careful what I say because, for all I know, some of these people I’ve met are working on truly revolutionary, paradigm-shifting, world-changing innovations. The chances are, however, that they’re not.
And that’s not just me being mean. I’m sure you’re well aware that the likelihood of any idea going anywhere is pretty slim – most new businesses barely make it off the starting blocks and, more often than not, the ones that do are destined to fail.
So, in light of the terrible odds facing these bright-eyed entrepreneurs, the chances of their businesses making it are, at least in my opinion, even more slim. If their ideas haven’t so much as had the oxygen of discussion, they really don’t stand a fighting chance.
PESSIMISM AND OPTIMISM
Ideas are extremely precious little things. You can absolutely assume that the first incarnation of any idea is completely wrong – that it needs more bashing about, further iterations, until it actually makes sense. I sometimes think that the perfect environment for an idea to succeed is one with equal parts of blind optimism and honest pessimism.
Let me explain what I mean by this. First off, there’s definitely a need for a little bit of blind faith in the recipe of what makes an idea succeed. If you analyse any idea enough, you’ll soon put yourself off starting it at all. The thing is that most ideas don’t make a lot of sense in the beginning. It’s only by having the faith of actually getting them going and learning